There are tenet melees that pause combo when you sheathe them. You would still be relying on combo but could put it away and save the multiplier for when you’d like to engage in melee.
Innodem is good as a combo weapon or heavy attack weapon and would be my suggestion. With a heavy build, corrupt charge, and covert lethality you can always activate the incarnon mode (with the proper evolution) via heavy attack without starting a combo in order to get the running speed bonuses and additionally the forced slash procs on the heavy dagger attacks will make mincemeat of SP enemies (since slash DOT ignores armor.
The Vastilok can get a 12x combo within 1 or 2 regular attacks (double shot from High Noon stance) using the Quickening mod while applying slash and stripping armor extremely fast. So while it does rely on 12x combo the combo is basically free. This works well for frames that can’t deal with armor and don’t want to play Unairu.
While not exactly what you might be looking for:
There are tenet melees that pause combo when you sheathe them. You would still be relying on combo but could put it away and save the multiplier for when you’d like to engage in melee.
Innodem is good as a combo weapon or heavy attack weapon and would be my suggestion. With a heavy build, corrupt charge, and covert lethality you can always activate the incarnon mode (with the proper evolution) via heavy attack without starting a combo in order to get the running speed bonuses and additionally the forced slash procs on the heavy dagger attacks will make mincemeat of SP enemies (since slash DOT ignores armor.
The Vastilok can get a 12x combo within 1 or 2 regular attacks (double shot from High Noon stance) using the Quickening mod while applying slash and stripping armor extremely fast. So while it does rely on 12x combo the combo is basically free. This works well for frames that can’t deal with armor and don’t want to play Unairu.
That’s my 2 cents.
Good luck Tenno.